IT Infrastructuur Architectuur Blog

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My Book

In 2017, the third edition of my book on Infastructure Architecture called "Infrastructure Architecture - Infrastructure Building Blocks and Concepts" was published.

Abstract

IT infrastructure has been the foundation that enabled successful application deployments for many decades. Yet, general and up to date infrastructure knowledge is not widespread. Experience shows that software developers, system administrators, and project managers often have little knowledge of the big influence IT infrastructure has on performance, availability and security of software applications.

This book explains the concepts, history, and implementation of IT infrastructures. Although many of books can be found on each individual infrastructure building block, this is the first book to describe all of them: datacenters, servers, networks, storage, operating systems, and end user devices.

The building blocks described in this book provide functionality, but they also provide the non-functional attributes performance, availability, and security. These attributes are explained on a conceptual level in separate chapters, and more specific in the chapters about each individual building block.

Whether you need an introduction to infrastructure technologies, a refresher course, or a study guide for a computer science class, you will find that the presented building blocks and concepts provide a solid foundation for understanding the complexity of today’s IT infrastructures.

This book can be used as a study book – it is used by a number of universities in the USA, as part of their IT architecture courses, based on the IS 2010.4 curriculum.

Note to the Third Edition

In the third edition of this book, a number of corrections were made, some terminology is explained in more detail, and several typos and syntax errors were fixed. In addition, the following changes were made:

The infrastructure model was updated to reflect the Networking-Storage-Compute terminology used by most vendors today, and to emphasize the position of systems management.

The chapter on infrastructure trends was removed.

The text was blended with the text in the other chapters.

The amount of text on the historic context for each building block was reduced.

The Virtualization chapter and Server chapter were combined and renamed to Compute.

The storage chapter was reorganized to reflect the new storage building block model.

The chapter on Security was rearranged and updated.

Part IV on infrastructure management was added, with chapters on the infrastructure lifecycle, deployment options, assembling and testing, running the infrastructure, systems management processes, and decommissioning.

In various parts of the book, new cloud technology concepts were added, like Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS), Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), infrastructure as code, and container technology.

A chapter was added explaining the infrastructure purchase process, as this is part of the IS 2010.4 curriculum.

All footnotes were converted to endnotes.

The index was renewed.

Finally, as technology advanced in the past years, the book was updated to contain the most recent information.

Course Material

The book is used in a number of universities in the USA, Australia, Chile, and Kuwait, as study material for their IT infrastructure courses. The book is especially suited for courses based on the IS 2010.4 curriculum. A reference matrix of the IS 2010.4 curriculum topics (as used in many universities in the USA) and the relevant sections in this book is provided in the appendix.

Based on requests from university professors, I created a set of course materials. It contains all pictures used in the book in both Viso and high-resolution PNG format, the list of abbreviations, a PowerPoint slide deck for each chapter (715 slides in total), and a set of test question per chapter (204 questions in total).